Weird Stuff

[mystical_mountain_9]

I consider myself fortunate to have spent much of my childhood in the 1970s for a whole lot of reasons: music, film, fashion, environmental awareness/nature conservation, and culture in general. A time when the interiors of houses were colourful and parking lots had cars of nearly every imaginable colour and hue (though I admit, I recall seeing only one deep purple car during the whole decade) until gradually, decade by decade they faded away and have been replaced by the current Monochromatic Twenties. More importantly, to me, it was also a great decade for those who were fans of literature about weird stuff: UFOs, bigfoot, ghosts, the Bermuda Triangle – you name it – available aplenty in any bookstore you walked into. And I walked into a lot of bookstores during that decade with one or more titles tucked under my arm. Why waste one’s allowance and meagre odd job earnings on chocolates or chips when one could spend it on a good record or good book that will raise the hair on the back of your neck?

I guess I was lucky, too, that my house had a well-stocked private library with quite a few titles of the “weird” variety which my dad encouraged me to dive into at an early age. Living in an old town that had loads of haunted houses as well as the occasional sighting of UFOs and mysterious big black cats on the outskirts certainly helped to stoke the fires of my oddball interest!

During the first few years of my hobby of reading about the unexplained, I assimilated everything hook, line and sinker. Including bizarre stories published in The National Enquirer which we’d pick up in the supermarket checkout line. But then I started to ask myself questions, especially regarding UFOs: How were so many different objects described? How could the descriptions of the “occupants” of these crafts vary so widely? Were we being visited by the inhabitants of dozens of different worlds? And how would it be possible for them to cover such vast distances of space? (This was during the time of the launch of Voyager spacecraft and NASA’s Viking Mars missions, which I avidly followed.) It simply did not make sense! And so, by the time I was in my early teens, I dismissed interstellar travel as impossible and with the not-so-subtle logic of the teenage male mind, I simply blocked all UFO stuff out of my mind in pursuit of other things. Gradually, my interest in bigfoot, ghosts, and the rest also subsided, though I never explained them away. I just abandoned them like I had abandoned my toy cars and plastic model planes some years earlier.

But I never abandoned my interest in the weird and the inexplicable. During my university years, I discovered the writings of Charles Fort and several other authors along the same line. I also had personal encounters with weird stuff – ghosts, UFOs, and not-so-nice entities. But I took it all in stride and put it on the intellectual backburner, telling myself that this stuff happens, whatever it is, but it does not deserve much time or attention.

That all changed in 2002 with the release of the film The Mothman Prophecies. I was familiar with the book of the same title (by John A. Keel) but had never found it in bookstores, though I had really wanted to read it back in the ‘70s.

A few years earlier I had heard the name Jacque Vallee and his theory that the UFO phenomenon and the faery phenomenon had a common cause or were even the same thing. I quickly devoured Vallee’s books, and then Keel’s books and then other books such as Patrick Harpur’s Daimonic Reality and Evans-Wentz’s The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Enter the rabbit hole…

In his initial book, Passport to Magonia, Jacque Vallee described, in great detail, the parallels between modern accounts of experiences with UFOs and medieval accounts of faeries – especially those who were seen in aircraft. Vallee had an impressive pedigree, having himself seeing “impossible” objects through the telescope – objects that were in a retrograde orbit around the Earth (that is, a orbiting the earth in the opposite direction to the earth's rotation) while working for NASA in 1961 -- a time at which such a feat could not be accomplished by artificial satellites – and having conducted research at hundreds of sites where UFO encounters were claimed. In later books, Vallee observed that the behaviour of the ufonauts to some degree paralleled the behaviour of the society that encounters it: for example, most accounts of humans being killed by encounters with UFOs come from Brazil – a country which has a much higher violent crime rate than in the USA or Europe. Eventually, Vallee stopped researching the phenomenon and got involved in a much more “earthly” pursuit of tech investing. Interesting…

The theme of UFO-faery connection was well picked up by Patrick Harpur in Daimonic Reality. Like Vallee, he noted that descriptions of modern encounters with UFOs and their inhabitants closely match descriptions in previous centuries of faeries and related phenomena. Parallels include anomalous lights at night; witnesses encountering a strange dream-like atmosphere at the time of a sighting; incidents of time standing still or missing time; beings of various descriptions and sizes from the giant to the miniscule; superiority to humans – the fairies are more intelligent and cunning than us, while the ufonauts are technologically superior to us. Likewise, an experience with either faeries or ufonauts can be beneficial (including healings), horrific (including abduction) or indifferent (a brief sighting but with no interaction per se). Harpur also notes strange “opposites” between fairies and ufonauts: the former tend to be dressed in antiquated clothing and always say that they are leaving (but never seem to totally leave); while the latter tend to be dressed in futuristic/space-type clothing and always say that they are coming to Earth (but never seem to totally arrive). In Daimonic Reality, Harpur also ventures into the phenomenon of unexplained beasts, monsters and bigfoot: he notes that quite often they, too, share qualities with the faeries and UFOs such as suddenly appearing and disappearing. Ultimately, Harpur suggests that all these phenomena can be simply lumped into the category of “apparitions”, explaining that:

We cannot investigate [phantom] dogs without [phantom] cats; cats without fairies; fairies without Bigfoot and lake monsters; any of these without UFOs and aliens. The investigation always broadens to embrace, in the end, all apparitions, as if there were a single principle at work capable of manifesting itself in a myriad forms.

Not simply being content to investigate the strange phenomena in myriad forms that have been experienced worldwide since time immemorial, Harpur turns his investigation around at the observers and reporters of such phenomena. He notes similarities between the stories of UFO abductions with the descriptions of the shaman’s journey and posits that quite possibly what people in non-tribal societies are experiencing is shamanic initiation. However, since cultures such as ours lack a shamanic tradition, our “psychics” have no framework to shape and channel their innate abilities and therefore remain undeveloped – that is, they tend not to become healers or prophets. “Contactees” cannot make sense of their experience on their own and have no tutor to guide them in integrating their encounters with the “other world” into their lives.

Harpur’s work led me to Evans-Wentz and his book The Fairy-Faith in Celtic Countries. Evans-Wentz was fortunate to have conducted his field research in rural Britain during the early decades of the 20^th century – a time when many of the “old timers” were still alive to tell of their own experiences, or experiences of their parents’ generation, with faeries – a phenomenon that became much more rare in the 20^th century as UFOs became more prevalent. The accounts he recorded were astonishing – but what really took me for a loop were the accounts given by the Celtic people of Brittany, as their faery stories were closely associated with the spirits of the dead. Faeries being related to ghosts or one and the same thing? That really took me for a loop!

John A. Keel is one of my favourite writers on the topic of weird stuff because of his single-minded pursuit of the phenomena, old-style investigative reporter style, combined with a hard-headed rationalist-materialist perspective – that is, until he realized, in Dorothy’s words, he was “not in Kansas anymore” and had to radically change his perspective on what constitutes “reality”. As described in Operation Trojan Horse, Keel discovered that he was not only the “hunter”; he was also the “hunted” (so to speak) as well as being toyed with by something that was far beyond his comprehension:

Within a year after I had launched my full-time UFO investigating effort in 1966, the phenomenon had zeroed in on me, just as it had done with the British newspaper editor Arthur Shuttlewood and so many others. My telephone ran amok first, with mysterious strangers calling day and night to deliver bizarre messages "from the space people." Then I was catapulted into the dreamlike fantasy world of demonology. I kept rendezvous with black Cadillacs on Long Island, and when I tried to pursue them, they would disappear impossibly on dead-end roads. Throughout 1967, I was called out in the middle of the night to go on silly wild-goose chases and try to affect "rescues" of troubled contactees. Luminous aerial objects seemed to follow me around like faithful dogs. The objects seemed to know where I was going and where I had been. I would check into a motel chosen at random only to find that someone had made a reservation in my name and had even left a string of nonsensical telephone messages for me. I was plagued by impossible coincidences, and some of my closest friends in New York, none of whom was conversant with the phenomenon, began to report strange experiences of their own -- poltergeists erupted in their apartments, ugly smells of hydrogen sulfide haunted them. One girl of my acquaintance suffered an inexplicable two-hour mental blackout while she was sitting under a hair dryer alone in her own apartment. More than once I woke up in the middle of the night to find myself unable to move, with a huge dark apparition standing over me.

For a time I questioned my own sanity. I kept profusive notes-a daily journal which now reads like something from the pen of Edgar Allen Poe or HP Lovecraft.

Previous to all this I was a typical hard-boiled skeptic. I sneered at the occult. I had once published a book, “Jadoo”, which denigrated the mystical legends of the Orient. I tried to adopt a very scientific approach to ufology, and this meant that I scoffed at the many contactee reports. But as my experiences mounted and investigations broadened, I rapidly changed my views.

Keel related how he ended up spending months searching for nonexistent UFO bases and trying to protect witnesses from the “men in black” and how he was plagued by poltergeist manifestations wherever he went. At times he found it difficult to determine if the situations he was experiencing were somehow being unwittingly created by himself or whether they were independent of his mind.

In the same book, Keel describes a series of “prophecies” that he received either directly, or via persons he was in contact with, during much of 1967. A big power failure was predicted in May; it manifested in four states on June 5. In May the UFO entities declared that Pope Paul would visit Turkey in the coming months and would be bloodily assassinated (weeks later the Vatican announced the Pope’s plan to visit Turkey in July -- he did go, but there was no assassination attempt). Several plane crashes predicted in June occurred in July. In October, he was told that "the Hopi and Navajo Indians will make headlines shortly before Christmas"; early in December a blizzard struck the Indian reservations in the Four Corners area of the Southwest, necessitating rescue efforts to rush them supplies and medicine. In late October a being who was allegedly a UFO entity warned Keel that there would soon be a major disaster on the Ohio River and that many people would drown and that when President Johnson turns on the lights on the White House Christmas tree in December, a huge blackout would take place; on December 15, President Johnson held the Christmas tree lighting ceremony at the White House, but instead of a power cut, mere moments after the ceremony was held, newscasters announced that the Silver Bridge between Gallipolis, Ohio, and Pleasant Point, West Virginia has just collapsed, heavily laden with rush-hour traffic (an event that had been foreseen by several Pleasant Point residents known to Keel a few weeks previously). On December 11, a mysterious caller informed Keel that there would be an airplane disaster in Tucson, Arizona; the next day, an Air Force jet crashed into a shopping center in Tucson.

Keel writes that:

What astonished me most was that these predictions were coming in from a wide variety of sources. Trance mediums and automatic writers in touch with the spirit world were corning up with the same things as the UFO contactees. Often the prophecies were phrased identically in different sections of the country. Even when they failed to come off, we still could not overlook this peculiar set of correlative factors.

But not everything that was predicted happened. The big “cosmic hoax” was a prediction relayed to Keel of a nation-wide three-day blackout that would happen after the Pope’s visit to Turkey. Having seen several predictions come true to the letter earlier in the month, Keel packed up his equipment, rented a car, and drove out to the UFO flap area near Melville, Long Island in expectation. Keel writes:

Just before I left Manhattan, I stopped in a local delicatessen and bought three quarts of distilled water. I figured that a three-day power failure would certainly be accompanied by a water shortage. On my way out to Long Island I stopped in on a silent contactee, and he told me he had received a brief visit from a UFO entity a short time before. This entity had mentioned me, he said, and had given him a message to relay to me. The message didn't make sense to the contactee. It was, "Tell John we'll meet with him and help him drink all that water." (The water was in the trunk of the car, and the contactee had no way of knowing I had it.)

In retrospect, Keel saw that through his experience of UFO-chasing in 1966-1967, the “phenomenon” was slowly leading him from skepticism to belief to -- incredibly -- disbelief. He was fortunate in this respect, as other people who have become involved in this phenomenon settled upon and accepted a single frame of reference (absolute faith in the information they were receiving from the “space people”) and were quickly engulfed in disaster. It is interesting to note that John Keel ended up backing away from the whole “UFO thing” shortly afterwards and never returned to it as an investigative reporter. When later questioned about what he really believed about the phenomenon, Keel was pretty tight-lipped but would curtly state that it was well described by the Neoplatonist Iamblicus and that demonology provides a strong clue. Keel had stared into the abyss, and, to his surprise, the abyss had stared back at him – and then it nearly drove him insane. It seems that Keel got burnt very badly from this experience and he strongly warned people – especially children and youth – against delving into occult investigations. This comment may seem odd, as Keel was a confessed atheist; it seems that he may not believe in God, but he certainly believed in disembodied intelligences (which he termed “ultraterrestrials”) and that they were up to no good with us humans.

After digesting these books, I said to myself, “wait a minute… if UFOs are connected to poltergeist phenomena, and fairies, and monsters, and the spirits of the dead, I need a philosophical upgrade!” Soon afterwards, I became aware of a book by John Michael Greer simply titled Monsters. Already knowing Greer’s pedigree and accomplishments as an occult author, I bought the book and read it thoroughly. And I am glad that I did. According to Greer, Western occult philosophy posits that “reality” consists of multiple planes: the physical (the regular world that we encounter with our senses), the etheric (or life force), the astral (ordinary mental activity, dreams, and imagination), the mental (abstract consciousness) and the spiritual (the soul or transcendent core of the self). Things that humans experience that cannot be validated on the physical plane (that, is weird things) belong to one of the other planes. Ghosts, faeries, chimeras, traditional vampires, and shape shifters/werewolves belong to the etheric plane; non-human spirits and demons belong to the astral plane; high spirits/intelligences belong to the mental plane; and angels belong to the spiritual plane. Importantly, it is not as though these planes are hermetically sealed off from one another; contact along the planes sometimes happens and those who are sensitive to these other planes (either by natural talent or training) can perceive them. This information was systematic, well explained, and helpful to me.

Another model that discusses weird things and that I found helpful is the Great Chain of Being: the medieval Christian “map” of all things created, seen and unseen, which is well described in CS Lewis’s The Discarded Image. God is at the top of the chain, minerals at the bottom of the chain, and humanity is exactly in the middle. It is in the Great Chain of Being that the nine ranks of angels are described. But the unseen portion of creation contains much more than just angels. The same is true in some other faiths: in Hinduism, for example, there are numerous categories of invisible beings (devas, gandharvas, nagas, kinnaras, yakshas) that sometimes interact with humans and there are 14 “worlds” (what occultists would call “planes”) in existence, with humans living in the eighth “world.” Though the terminology is different from the occult description provided by Greer, the gist is similar: multiple planes of existence, only a few parts of which (the links close to humans) can be ordinarily perceived by us. Regardless of the model one prefers, the result is the same: a kind of humbling about how little we really know about the “worlds” that are all around us all the time. How apt the words of Shakespeare through the voice of Hamlet: There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

In this day and age, in a culture that affirms that only one “plane” exists (the physical), a person like me who believes in all of this “weird stuff” is easily labelled as “gullible” or “odd” (or worse). That’s why I am cautious regarding whom I talk to about these things. Talking about ghost stories is a safe starting point; and then I test the boundaries after that. But I must be honest with myself: I have experienced quite a bit of “weird stuff” throughout my life: some has been beneficial, some has been harmful, and some has been entirely indifferent to me. I have not sought it out, though I have always been curious.

As a mystic, I do not dwell too much on these things, as there are more sublime things to contemplate. Nevertheless, I acknowledge their existence within a “live and let live” attitude. Everything in this universe has a purpose and a place to exist. Yes, I am mildly curious – but I take Keel’s warnings to heart. Some things are best left alone. I think I’ll just let sleeping monsters lie and tiptoe past them. Nevertheless, in the future I may flesh out my perspectives and/or experiences with some of these specific denizens of the “weird.”

Comments

[claire_58]

Good read.
I like your conclusions. I see the earth as home to all kinds of beings good, bad, and indifferent, just as you say. Being respectful but not necessarily engaging is my approach. Although I'm prone to telling anything that is plaguing my thought to eff-off and leave me alone. Seems to work.

[mystical_mountain_9]

Thanks for the comment, Claire. As for your approach, hey - if it works, stick with it!